[syslinux] Debian bug#604245: Syslinux fails (does not receive key presses on Sony vaio Z12C5E)

[Gyorgy Jeney]

On 24 November 2010 20:25, Ferenc Wagner <wferi at niif.hu> wrote:
> "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa at zytor.com> writes:
>
>> On 11/24/2010 07:34 AM, Ferenc Wagner wrote:
>>
>>> Syslinux certainly used to work partitionless.  Maybe this feature was
>>> inadvertently lost during the major version change...  Peter?
>>
>> It's possible... it's also possible there is something in memory which
>> looks like a partition handover table.
>
> But would that have a fighting chance to break keyboard interaction
> only, after displaying a correct menu?
>
> György, could you please make sure that it's a keyboard issue only, for
> example by introducing a short timeout by replacing "timeout 0" with
> "timeout 50" in syslinux.cfg?  If your pendrive is /dev/sde, then do
>
> # zcat boot.img.gz >/dev/sde
> (just as you did originally, resulting in this bug report)
> # mount /dev/sde /mnt -oloop

Just curious, is there a reason to use a loopback device here?

> # sed -i '/^timeout/s/0/50/' /mnt/syslinux.cfg
> # umount /mnt
>
> and then try to boot the installer from the pendrive.  Now it should
> automatically choose the default item in the boot menu after 5 seconds
> (unless syslinux is actually frozen by this time).

I tried that.  When the menu appears, at the bottom, it counts down 5,
4, 3, 2, 1 and then reads something from the USB key for some time
(the activity light flashes on the key) and then just hangs at the
menu with the count being 1.  I waited about a minute before rebooting
at this point.

> Independently of the above, I wonder what the SYSLINUX banner says if
> it's started partitionless (like above) or from a partition (like when
> you dumped it into /dev/sde1).  In the working case it's easy to find
> out by quitting the menu via ESC then pressing Ctrl-V.  It will probably
> print "SYSLINUX 4.02 debian-20101014 EDD Copyright ...".  In the first,
> non-working case it's easiest to get this by renaming syslinux.cfg, so
> that it isn't found, thus the banner isn't overwritten by the menu.
> Maybe this unbreaks your keyboard, even... :)

There is a noticable delay between when the banner is displayed to
when the menu appears, so it's easy to hit the pause key at that
point.  The banner reads:

SYSLINUX 4.02 debian-20101014 EDD Copyright (C) 1994-2010 H. Peter Anvin et al

In both the partitionless and partitioned version.

nog.